Tag: android

Nearly a year after the disclosure of the Dirty COW vulnerability that affected the Linux kernel, cybercriminals have started exploiting the vulnerability against Android users.

Publicly disclosed last year in October, Dirty COW was present in a section of the Linux kernel—a part of virtually every Linux distribution, including Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu—for years and was actively exploited in the wild.

Security researchers from Trend Micro published a blog post on Monday disclosing that the privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195), known as Dirty COW, has now been actively exploited by a malware sample of ZNIU, detected as AndroidOS_ZNIU.

The ZNIU malware was detected in more than 40 countries last month, with the majority of the victims found in China and India. The malware was also detected in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Germany, and Indonesia. As of this writing, more than 5,000 affected users have been detected.

The malware uses the Dirty COW exploit to root Android devices via the copy-on-write (COW) mechanism in Android’s Linux kernel and install a backdoor which can then be used by attackers to collect data and generate profit through a premium rate phone number.

ZNIU’s leveraging of Dirty COW only works on Android devices with ARM/X86 64-bit architecture. However, this recent exploit can bypass SELinux and plant a root backdoor, while the PoC can only modify the service code of the system.

INFECTION CHAIN

The ZNIU malware often appears as a porn app downloaded from malicious websites, where users are tricked into clicking on a malicious URL that installs the malware-carrying app on their device. Once launched, ZNIU will communicate with its C&C server. If an update to its code is available, it retrieves it from the C&C server and loads it into the system. Simultaneously, the Dirty COW exploit will be used to provide local privilege escalation to overcome system restrictions and plant a backdoor for potential remote control attacks in the future.

After entering the main UI of the device, the malware will harvest the carrier information of the user. It then transacts with the carrier through an SMS-enabled payment service, allowing the malware operator to pose as the device owner. Through the victim’s mobile device, the operator behind ZNIU will collect money through the carrier’s payment service. In one of the samples, in its code the payments were directed to a dummy company, which, based on network traffic, was located in a city in China. When the SMS transaction is over, the malware will delete the messages from the device, leaving no sign of the transaction between the carrier and the malware operator. If the carrier is outside China, there will be no possible SMS transaction with the carrier, but the malware will still exploit the system to plant a backdoor.

The main logic of ZNIU’s native code works as follows:

1. Collect the model information of the device.

2. Fetch appropriate rootkits from the remote server.

3. Decrypt the exploits.

4. Trigger exploits one by one, check the result, and remove exploit files.

5. Report if the exploit succeeded or failed.

The researchers found the malware has already infected more than 5,000 Android users across 40 countries in recent weeks, with the majority of victims found in China and India, while other resides in the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany and Indonesia.

Google has released an update for Android that, among other fixes, officially fixes the Dirty COW vulnerability. The tech giant also confirmed that its Play Protect now protects Android users against this malware.

The easiest way to prevent yourself from being targeted by such clever malware is to avoid downloading apps from third-party sources and always stick to the official Google Play Store.

Researchers at Lookout have identified a mobile trojan called xRAT with extensive data collection functionality and the ability to remotely run a suicide function to avoid detection. The malware is associated with the high-profile Xsser / mRAT malware, which made headlines after targeting both iOS and Android devices of pro-democracy Hong Kong activists in late 2014.

xRAT has many similarities with mRAT, it has the same structure and uses the same decryption key. The analysis of the code revealed that both malware uses the same naming conventions that suggest both malicious codes were developed by the same threat actor.

According to researchers from security firm Lookout, the command and control (C&C) servers used for the xRAT malware is the same of a Windows malware, a circumstance that suggests the threat actor is composed of experienced experts.

xRAT supports an impressive set of capabilities that include flexible reconnaissance and information gathering, detection evasion, specific checks for antivirus, app and file deletion functionality.It also searches for data belonging to popular communications apps like QQ and WeChat.

Listed below are the types of data gathered by xRAT and features that enable it to perform reconnaissance, run remote code, and exfiltrate data from Android devices:

Automatically retrieve files that are of an attacker specified type that are between a minimum and maximum size

Search external storage for a file with a specific MD5 hash and, if identified, retrieve it

Upload attacker specified files to C2 infrastructure

Make a call out to an attacker specified number

Record audio and write it directly to an already established command and control network socket

Executes attacker specified command as the root user

Downloads a 22MB trojanized version of QQ from hiapk[.]com, saving it to /sdcard/.wx/wx.apk. Referred to as ‘rapid flow mode’.

To avoid detection, the xRAT implements a “suicide” function that could be triggered to clean the installation on the infected mobile device.

The developers behind xRAT created an alert system, flagging to the malware operator if any of the following antivirus applications are present on a compromised device.

管家 (housekeeper)

安全 (safety)

权限 (Authority)

卫士 (Guardian)

清理 (Cleanup)

杀毒 (Antivirus)

Defender

Security

xRAT can be remotely instructed to perform a wide range of deletion operations, such as removing large portions of a device or attacker-specified files like images from certain directories on the SDCard, all apps and data from /data/data/, and all system apps from /system/app/.

Most of the C&C infrastructure used by xRAT in the past were based in China, but sample recently analyzed by the company were located in the United States.

As anticipated, the C&C infrastructure also controlled a Windows malware, the experts also noticed a malicious executable named MyExam, this means that “the actors behind this family may be continuing to target students, similar to how attackers used mRAT during the protests in 2014.”

A group of nine researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara researchers have discovered a number of code execution and denial of service zero day flaws in the bootloaders of Android chipsets from six vendors.

The analyzed the interaction between the Android OS and chip using a custom tool dubbed “BootStomp.” that automatically detects security vulnerabilities in bootloaders.

Since bootloaders are usually closed source and hard to reverse-engineer, performing analysis on them is difficult, especially because hardware dependencies hinder dynamic analysis.

Therefore, the researchers created BootStomp, which “uses a novel combination of static analysis techniques and underconstrained symbolic execution to build a multi-tag taint analysis capable of identifying bootloader vulnerabilities.”

The tool helped the researchers discover six previously-unknown critical security bugs across bootloaders from HiSilicon (Huawei), Qualcomm, MediaTek, and NVIDIA, which could be exploited by attackers to unlock device bootloader, install custom malicious ROM and persistent rootkits.

Five of the vulnerabilities have already been confirmed by their respective by the chipset vendors. Researchers also found a known bug (CVE-2014-9798) in Qualcomm’s bootloaders, which was previously reported in 2014, but still present and usable.

Some of the discovered flaws even allow an attacker with root privileges on the Android operating system to execute malicious code as part of the bootloader or to perform permanent denial-of-service attacks.

According to the researchers, the vulnerabilities impact the ARM’s “Trusted Boot” or Android’s “Verified Boot” mechanisms that chip-set vendors have implemented to establish a Chain of Trust (CoT), which verifies the integrity of each component the system loads while booting the device.

A root user’s ability to write the nve and oem_info partitions, from which configuration data and memory access permissions governing the smartphone’s peripherals can be read.

A memory corruption issue that could allow an attacker to install a persistent rootkit.

An arbitrary memory write bug that lets an attacker run arbitrary code as the bootloader itself.

The vulnerabilities discovered by the researchers rely on the attacker’s ability to write in the non-volatile memory which is accessed by the bootloader, for this reason, researchers propose a series of mitigation strategies to both limits the attack surface of the bootloader and enforce various desirable properties aimed at safeguarding the security and privacy of users. The measures include the use of hardware features already implemented in most modern devices that don’t allow the writing on specific partitions of the memory.partition of the memory.

A team of security researchers from several security firms have uncovered a new, widespread botnet that consists of tens of thousands of hacked Android smartphones.

Dubbed WireX, detected as “Android Clicker,” the botnet network primarily includes infected Android devices running one of the hundreds of malicious apps installed from Google Play Store and is designed to conduct massive application layer DDoS attacks.

Researchers from Akamai, Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Google, Oracle Dyn, RiskIQ, Team Cymru, and other organizations cooperated to combat this botnet. Evidence indicates that the botnet may have been active as early as August 2nd, but it was the attacks on August 17th that drew the attention of these organizations when multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and content providers were subject to significant attacks.

The first available indicators of the WireX botnet appeared on August 2nd as minor attacks that went unnoticed at the time. It wasn’t discovered until researchers began searching for the 26 character User-Agent string in logs.

WireX is a volumetric DDoS attack at the application layer. The traffic generated by the attack nodes is primarily HTTP GET requests, though some variants appears to be capable of issuing POST requests. In other words, the botnet produces traffic resembling valid requests from generic HTTP clients and web browsers.

Estimated growth of the botnet based on the count of unique IPs per hour observed participating in attacks.

During initial observation, the majority of the traffic from this botnet was distinguished by the use of an HTTP Request’s User-Agent string containing the lowercase English alphabet characters, in random order.

Variants of the malware have also been observed emitting User-Agent strings of varying length and expanded character sets, sometimes including common browser User-Agents. Here are some samples of other User-Agents observed:

After further investigation, security researchers identified more than 300 malicious apps on Google’s official Play Store, many of which purported to be media, video players, ringtones, or tools for storage managers and app stores, which include the malicious WireX code.

Just like many malicious apps, WireX apps do not act maliciously immediately after the installation in order to evade detection and make their ways to Google Play Store.

Investigation of the logs from attacks on August 17th revealed previous attacks meeting the same signature implicated the first Android application, “twdlphqg_v1.3.5_apkpure.com.apk”.

Many of the identified applications fell into the categories of media/video players, ringtones or tools such as storage managers and app stores with additional hidden features that were not readily apparent to the end users that were infected. At the launch of the applications, the nefarious components begin their work by starting the command and control polling service which queries the command and control server, most commonly g[.]axclick[.]store, for attack commands. When attack commands are received, the parsing service inspects the raw attack command, parses it and invokes the attacking service with the extracted parameters.

The applications that housed these attack functions, while malicious, appeared to be benign to the users who had installed them. These applications also took advantage of features of the Android service architecture allowing applications to use system resources, even while in the background, and are thus able to launch attacks when the application is not in use. Antivirus scanners currently recognize this malware as the “Android Clicker” trojan, but this campaign’s purpose has nothing to do with click fraud. It is likely that this malware used to be related to click fraud, but was repurposed for DDoS.

PREVENTION & MITIGATION

If your device is running a newer version of the Android operating system that includes Google’s Play Protect feature, the company will automatically remove WireX apps from your device, if you have one installed.

Also, it is highly recommended to install apps from reputed and verified developers, even when downloading from Google official Play Store and avoid installing unnecessary apps.

Additionally, you are strongly advised to always keep a good antivirus app on your mobile device that can detect and block malicious apps before they can infect your device, and always keep your device and apps up-to-date.

Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new variant of the Android banking Trojan called Faketoken that now has capabilities to detect and record an infected device’s calls and display overlays on top of taxi booking apps to steal banking information.

Dubbed Faketoken.q, the new variant of mobile banking trojan is being distributed using bulk SMS messages as their attack vector, prompting users to download an image file that actually downloads the malware.

The mobile Trojan that we examined consists of two parts. The first part is an obfuscated dropper (verdict: Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Fyec.az): files like this are usually obfuscated on the server side in order to resist detection. At first glance, it may seem that its code is gibberish.

However, this is code works quite well. It decrypts and launches the second part of the malware. This is standard practice these days, whereas unpacked Trojans are very rare.

The second part of the malware, which is a file with DAT extensions, contains the malware’s main features. The data becomes encrypted.

By decrypting the data, it is possible to obtain a rather legible code.

After the Trojan initiates, it hides its shortcut icon and starts to monitor all of the calls and whichever apps the user launches. Upon receiving a call from (or making a call to) a certain phone number, the malware begins to record the conversation and sends it to evildoers shortly after the conversation ends.

The authors of Faketoken.q kept the overlay features and simplified them considerably. So, the Trojan is capable of overlaying several banking and miscellaneous applications, such as Android Pay, Google Play Store, and apps for paying traffic tickets and booking flights, hotel rooms, and taxis.

Faketoken.q monitors active apps and, as soon as the user launches a specific one, it substitutes its UI with a fake one, prompting the victim to enter his or her bank card data. The substitution happens instantaneously, and the colors of the fake UI correspond to those of the original launched app.

Since fraudsters require an SMS code sent by the bank to authorise a transaction, the malware steals incoming SMS message codes and forward them to the attackers command-and-control (C&C) server for a successful attack.

According to the researchers, Faketoken.q has been designed to target Russian-speaking users, as it uses the Russian language on the user interface.

PREVENTION & MITIGATION

The easiest way to prevent yourself being a victim of such mobile banking Trojans is to avoid downloading apps via links provided in messages or emails, or any third-party app store.

You can also go to Settings → Security and make sure “Unknown sources” option is turned off in order to block installation of apps from unknown sources.

Most importantly, verify app permissions before installing apps, even if it is downloaded from official Google Play. If you find any app asking more than what it is meant for, just do not install it.

It’s always a good idea to install an antivirus app from a reputed vendor that can detect and block such malware before it can infect your device, and always keep your system and apps up-to-date.

How does Lipizzan work?

Lipizzan was a sophisticated two stage spyware tool. The first stage found by Google Play Protect was distributed through several channels, including Google Play, and typically impersonated an innocuous-sounding app such as a “Backup” or “Cleaner” app. Upon installation, Lipizzan would download and load a second “license verification” stage, which would survey the infected device and validate certain abort criteria. If given the all-clear, the second stage would then root the device with known exploits and begin to exfiltrate device data to a Command & Control server.

Once implanted on a target device

The Lipizzan second stage was capable of performing and exfiltrating the results of the following tasks:

The spyware is also able to collect data from specific apps, including WhatsApp, Snapchat, Viber, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Gmail, Skype, Hangouts, and KakaoTalk.

Google researchers have found at least 20 apps in Play Store which infected fewer than 100 Android smartphones in total, the company classified the infections as targeted attacks.

“We have found 20 Lipizzan apps distributed in a targeted fashion to fewer than 100 devices in total and have blocked the developers and apps from the Android ecosystem. Google Play Protect has notified all affected devices and removed the Lipizzan apps.” states Google.

A team of researchers from the University of Michigan discovered that hundreds of applications in Google Play Store have a security hole that could allow hackers to steal data from and inject malware on millions of Android smartphones.

The actual issue lies within apps that create open ports, that are not properly closed. It is a known problem with computers and smartphones.

This issue has nothing to do with Android OS or the handset; instead, the origin of this so-called back-door is due to insecure coding practices by various app developers. Android App developers are constantly growing over the years, as it is the most used mobile OS platform.

What makes it dangerous?

There are 65636 ports in any system that is connected to internet. If the ports are not closed, then attackers can enter via these ports and steal users data. They can also inject malware into the system and execute them. It’ll be easier to access photos, media files and even use messaging and phone services.

The team used its custom tool to scan over 100,000 Android applications and found 410 potentially vulnerable applications – many of which have been downloaded between 10 and 50 Million times and at least one app comes pre-installed on Android smartphones.

To get an initial estimate on the impact of these vulnerabilities, the team performed a port scanning in its campus network, and within 2 minutes it found a number of mobile devices potentially using these vulnerable apps.

They manually confirmed the vulnerabilities for 57 applications, including popular mobile apps with 10 to 50 million downloads from official app marketplaces, and also an app that is pre-installed on a series of devices from one manufacturer.

No doubt, an open port is an attack surface, but it should be noted that port opened by an application can not be exploited until a vulnerability exists in the application, like improper authentication, remote code execution or buffer overflow flaws.

Besides this, an attacker must have the IP address of the vulnerable device, exposed over the Internet. But getting a list of vulnerable devices is not a big deal today, where anyone can buy a cheap cloud service to scan the whole Internet within few hours.

These vulnerabilities can be exploited to cause highly-severe damage to users like remotely stealing contacts, photos, and even security credentials, and also performing sensitive actions such as malware installation and malicious code execution.

Prevention:

Almost 81.7% of the newly sold devices use Android as their platform. Those applications that pose a threat can be removed by un-installing it. If the app is un-installed, then it will no longer pose the threat. But then, many apps would have to be removed from the mobile. The best choice is that we use a Firewall.

NoRoot Firewall is one of the good firewalls to be used in android platform. It blocks every application installed in the mobile from using the internet, if options are set. It can also block certain apps from accessing the listed addresses and ports.